When a woman was found strangled to death near a park in Alhambra last weekend, the media’s reaction to the homicide, like most grisly crimes, was swift.

Yet days after television cameras and reporters descended on the home of Donglei “Kyral” Shi, the flow of information about the 31-year-old graphic artist abruptly stopped. And despite the heinous circumstances surrounding her death, the national news media didn’t bat an eye.

Because they don’t have the resources available to research news in cities across the country, national news outlets often rely on local coverage as a starting point for national crime stories. But which stories get chosen, and why, is a complex and sometimes unpredictable phenomenon, according to journalists and media experts.

There is no tried-and-true recipe of factors that guarantees a homicide case will transform from a local tragedy to a national spectacle on the scale of the Natalie Holloway case, according to Greta Van Susteren, host of Fox New’s On The Record.

“I wish there was some magic formula for all this stuff,” Susteren said in a phone interview. “There is no shortage of horrible cases that should be followed.”

But even if coverage can seem random, national news reporters are definitely on the lookout for certain elements that grab attention, stories “that sort of turn the regular norms upside down,” according to Denise Poon, a Pasadena freelance journalist who has worked for Dateline NBC and America’s Most Wanted.

“My experience covering crime stories, especially crime stories that have a broad or mainstream interest, is that everyone relates to characters that are compelling,” Poon said.

The most compelling cases involve murders with unusual circumstances, cases that seem senseless or cruel, or crimes that could represent a budding trend, Poon said.

Poon recalled a story years ago where she was sent out on an assignment to follow around homicide detectives until she found a newsworthy murder case. Because many of the cases were open-and-shut, or didn’t involve a cast of colorful characters, she and her team had to ignore them.

“It sounds horrible but essentially we were waiting – and we had no control over this – but we were waiting for something horrible to happen to an innocent person,” Poon said. “We were looking for a situation that had possible twists and turns and intrigue and that would keep viewers attention for a full hour.”

Drug deals gone bad or gang murders in bad neighborhoods didn’t make the cut, Poon said. She wound up covering a high-profile shooting that occurred during a Labor Day party.

A young man was shot and killed after a fight erupted at a home while the parents of the host were out of town. The story ultimately appeared on national television as part of a series.

Unfortunately in Poon’s eyes, the few details available about the life and death of Shi are hardly likely to garner similar national media attention.

Shi worked a variety of graphic design and tax preparation jobs over the past few years, according to her online profiles. She did not appear to be wealthy, and lived in a small apartment in San Gabriel with her parents.

Felix Gutierrez, a journalism professor at the USC Annenberg school, said that the media often gravitates toward crime stories in upper-class neighborhoods, where crime is seen as an anomaly, at the expense of those in poorer areas, where crime is seen as routine.

“Reporting of loss of life in some communities is less important to the media than lives lost in other communities,” Gutierrez said.

The race of a victim can also play a part in media coverage, according to UCLA Sociology Professor Darnell Hunt, who studies how race and ethnicity are covered in the media.

“Race plays a role in everything in America,” Hunt said. “There have been studies that show a racial disparity in terms of news coverage.”

The disappearance of Natalie Holloway in Aruba, or the murder of Laci Peterson by her husband in Modesto, both serve as examples of white female victims whose stories were plastered across national news shows for months.

Yet stories about the deaths of people of color are often under-reported, Gutierrez said.

“If a black kid gets killed in South Central LA or a Chicano kid gets kill in East LA, it won’t be a big story,” Gutierrez said.

But sometimes crimes are ignored by the national media simply because of a lack of available information about the case, Van Susteren said.

Local stories are much more conducive to national coverage if there is an abundance of sources to interview on camera, particularly ones that lobby for media coverage, both Van Susteren and Poon said.

“Often times cases get more national attention if the family members of the victims are pushing it,” Van Susteren said.

Shi’s death does not have that kind of advocacy. The family of the young Chinese immigrant has repeatedly denied requests for interviews with the media, and police have remained tight-lipped about the circumstances surrounding Shi’s death.

That further decreases the likelihood of national media attention, Van Susteren said.

“If the family won’t help and the police won’t help…and you have another situation where you can help and they really want your help, it makes it a lot easier,” she said. “Given two cases, which one do you do? The one where they want your help, or the one where they don’t?”